Mizzou Links, 5-7-09

Really, nothing good can come from this rule change. It’s a pretty obvious overreaction to the JT Tiller situation during the Marquette game, that is both backward looking and short-sighted. Sigh. The most likely consequence is that it lengthens the already insufferably long ends of college basketball games and produces greater involvement by the officials in end-of-game situations. If anything we need less incentive for college refs to blow the whistle.

A rule change so wanting in basic logic could only have emerged from a committee whose members are also combatants. One tell-tale sign of a rule that will not work well is when it governs extremely rare occurrence. Sometimes you need rules for rare cases (e.g., tie-breakers), but more often than not rare case rules end up being worse than the problem they were meant to solve.

This rule change governs cases where the foul is committed, but is NOT an intentional and/or technical, and the coach subs out an injured free throw shooter. Since I started paying attention to college hoops in the mid 80s I can count the times on one hand I’ve seen this. This rule change practically begs coaches strategize about a situation they had not previously strategized. I’ll give coaches enough credit to say that I don’t believe they’ll try to hurt opponents, just based on enlightened self-interest alone. The bigger potential issue I see is that this rule makes officiating ends of games that much harder. I don’t suspect the number of cases where a player is fouled hard enough that his coach would sub for him at the FT line will rise. Rather, officials will basically have to decide on the fly which coach gets to pick the substitute free throw shooter. If a player is injured enough to need a sub it probably easy enough to call an intentional foul.